One aspect of autonomous vehicles that few people seem to consider is its potential effect on the housing market.

Consider the size of the RV market, and the number of people who prefer the RV lifestyle after they retire. Now consider the fact that one of the more annoying aspects of owning an RV is that you have to drive it everywhere yourself.

Now imagine twenty years from now when you'll be able to buy an autonomous RV. You go to sleep in it, and in the middle of the night it takes you to whatever destination you desire. In the morning, you open the door and you're in a new city. What you really own is not an RV, but a magic house that can take you anywhere you desire, a few hundred miles every night.

With that kind of freedom, how many people would choose to become high-tech nomads, and never live on fixed piece of property again? In fact, I think this will be a major profit center for automakers. Most people won't bother owning cars when they can call for one on a smartphone, but $100K to $200K super-RVs will become the home of choice and the way for GM and Ford to stay in business.

The first time I read about this thing, I thought, "Why not just set it up at work? Get it running, throw the breakers coming from the power lines, and let this little "reactor" run the plant?"

One of the sure signs of pseudoscience is that the "inventor" cannot do anything useful with his creation, no matter how long he "refines" it.

If I could build a free energy generator, I wouldn't need to prove anything to anyone. If nothing else, I would unplug myself from the grid, and stop buying gasoline. On a larger scale, I could (for example) perform electrolysis of water and sell hydrogen in bulk quantities at a price no one else could touch. I wouldn't need true believers to worship me as a genius. I wouldn't need to put on ridiculous demonstrations. I would just make money, and lots of it.

That fact that Rossi and others of his ilk seem incapable of doing anything practical with their devices except try to solicit money from victims ... er, investors, should tell you everything you need to know about their validity.

Don't take it to the bank, but if you're heavily invested in oil stocks, you should be watching the saga.

I've been "watching the saga" surrounding free energy in its various incarnations ever since the early eighties. Another year, another bucket of hogwash. Nothing ever changes except the names of the latest batch of charlatans, and the bogus shell companies they create in an attempt to scam investors.

The fact that Sterling Allan is reporting this "news" should raise a huge red flag. Sterling is a nice enough guy, but he is a "true believer" for every bogus free energy claim that comes along. He has never met an unsubstantiated claim by a free energy crackpot that he didn't unashamedly promote.

You can be quite certain that no public demonstration by Defkalion will be taking place, or at least any sort of demonstration that will convince anyone with an ounce of skepticism. So no, I wouldn't try shorting oil stocks anytime soon. Oil, at least, can be burned for energy. Hogwash, not so much.

How a group like this doesn't get pulled under by Security Theater is beyond me.

On the contrary, you let groups like this meet and hold their convention. And then you identify, photograph, and monitor every attendee. What better way to get the bad guys to voluntarily reveal themselves?

Governments have been doing this for a long, long time. Read about some of the things that the FBI did under J. Edgar Hoover; it will enlighten you.

The thing that is owned in "intellectual property" is not well defined. That's a pretty big difference to real property. The concept of intellectual property is not even wrong. Calling each other foolish won't change that.

The definition of "real" property is not exactly carved in granite, either.

For example: assume I own a parcel of land. Does that mean I own everything beneath it, all the way down to the center of the earth? Does that mean I own all the airspace above it, all the way to the top of the earth's atmosphere? Clearly no, yet in general I do have the right to prevent someone from flying a remote-controlled drone directly above my rooftop, and I do have the right to prevent companies from extracting minerals below my land without my permission. I do have some rights above and below my parcel of land, but the limits of those rights must be determined by law and by the agreement of society in general.

And let's take it another step: assume I decide to rent out my property to someone else. He pays me rent, which I use to buy more property, and rent it out to more people. Eventually I am able to sit back and do nothing except collect rent from my property in perpetuity. I can even hire someone to manage my property for me, and do nothing but collect monthly checks and goof off.

But wait - I am now expecting a perpetual income from my property without working for it, based on my one-time purchase of that property. Clearly, this is a grave injustice against society, or so the "I don't believe in imaginary property" Slashdot meme goes. Yet would those same Slashdotters claim that one does not have to right to rent or lease one's own physical property? The fundamental concept of licensing a patent is exactly the same as that of renting one's land. So why is one bad, but the other okay?

You want to reject the entire concept of intellectual property because it is not precisely defined, but the ownership of real property is no more precise. The entire concept of "property" is hazy around the edges, because it is a societal construct in every respect. As the parent put it, "all property is imaginary".

If the current IP laws had existed at the beginning, we would only have a few stories, and an even smaller group of people would own everything.

The current laws are broken-- were intentionally broken by people who got the first big pile of money.

It's reasonable that people should be able to get a decent living and a reasonable return on their investments for a limited amount of time for each creation.

I agree with you completely.

If IP is real in the sense that property is real, then we need to start applying property tax to it.

There is no need, assuming that IP laws are correctly applied. The "tax" that the creator pays is that his IP goes to the public domain once his copyright or patent expires. In return for society enforcing his limited-time monopoly, all of us will eventually share it.

Now in situations where property is owned in perpetuity, then a tax is appropriate, because that is the fee that must be paid to society in order to enforce one's right to retain that property. So I pay property tax on my home, but I must eventually turn over my tax-free patent for the public good.

The problem, of course, is that corporations like Disney want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want perpetual copyright without paying for it. That is what needs to be changed, not the concept of intellectual property itself.

The idea of intellectual property is that you no longer have to bother doing a good job, you just have to own the right to something imaginary and you can make people pay for it.

All property is imaginary, whether it is physical or not. In a society without laws, there is no "property"; there is only what you can take or keep by physical force.

Then civilization developed along with the (imaginary) idea of property, i.e, that you had the right to possess something exclusive of your physical ability to control it, and that society has an obligation to enforce that imaginary right. Somehow you have no problem with that imaginary right, because you see it tied to a physical object, yet reject it when someone devotes his creative efforts to developing something non-physical (i.e. intellectual property) that benefits all of us. I have never understood that line of reasoning among Slashdotters.

For hundreds of years, our economy and the economies of most of the world flourished without this BS, yet fools still think that it would be impossible to live without it.

You mean those "hundreds of years" when 99% of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, and slaves, scraping out a subsistence living using primitive technology? You have a strange definite of "flourished".

The rise of the modern middle class is tied directly to the industrial revolution, which is tied directly to the rise of the concept of intellectual property. I want to see patent and copyright reform as much as anyone, and a return to the much saner limits of 50 to 100 years ago. But I also recognize that much of modern society is built on the pillars of intellectual property, and its historic benefits have far outweighed its more recent abuses.

Let's clean the dirty baby, not throw him out with the bathwater.

... when the watcher does more than just watch.

So are you talking about your government ... or about your next-door neighbor?

I have little doubt that the entire concept of privacy will be moot within 20 years, at least if you are outside your own home. But it won't just be the police watching you; it will be your employer and your neighbors and your friends and your family, and they will probably do an even better job of it. Combine crowd-sourced video from multiple sources, and I can see a day when anyone can track anyone else.

And here's the problem: there won't be a thing any of us can do about it. Surveillance tech is following its own cost / performance Moore's Law curve, and history has shown that when technology gives the average guy the ability to get something desirable at little cost (e.g. file-sharing of music and movies), then widespread abuse will inevitably follow.

With all the usual anti-government rants on Slashdot, people are missing the much bigger picture. They should worry less about the local police and more about every window in every house on every street in their neighborhood.

According to Ars Technica, the maximum sentence for the charges he faces is 10 years and $250,000 - and the sentencing guidelines for this instance, with no history is 0 - 6 months. So, as usual, slashdot blows it out of proportion by either making up numbers or quoting others who made up numbers to get a "oh noes, 30 years for handing out a password" headline.

You're right, he'll probably get probation or a couple of months in prison at worst, which is certainly appropriate for giving total strangers access to his former employer's network. The "30 years" number is the usual Slashdot hyperbole.

But for Keys, the secondary consequences are really much, much worse. If he is convicted, he will almost certainly be fired by Reuters and be blacklisted by major media employers. Who would trust him, knowing that he would pull stunts like that? That is a far more devastating punishment for his misdeeds.

Contact the Wounded Warrior Project. They have taken several donated P4 Dell boxes off my hands.

Like the OP, I have found it very difficult to find donors for older desktops. Craigslist may be useful in that respect, as individuals and small nonprofits sometimes ask for computer donations.

Personally, I have given up on reconditioning and donating desktops. Very few people want them. As others have mentioned, it really is better to recycle them, even if it goes against your grain to toss out a working piece of hardware.

Then add the aspect that someone looking at you wearing one is "recording" or at least "analyzing" everything seen and heard and sharing it with Google or whomever is quite invasive. It is one thing to give away your own privacy... and quite another to violate the privacy of everyone around you all the time.

And please don't bother replying to this with crap like "but you are in public". It doesn't matter if you are in public or not. And quite frankly, sitting in a booth at a restaurant with a few friends, there is way more than a reasonable expectation that your conversations, your body expressions, what you are wearing and eating, etc are not shared with Big Brother or the entire world.

While I agree that wearable computing will have many drawbacks just as you describe, there will be benefits as well. It is not a black or white issue.

Consider a world where no child will be able to bully another without leaving irrefutable video evidence, or a world where no public servant will be able to act like a thug or a rude asshole without leaving a video trail. Consider a world where no supervisor will be able to sexually harass a subordinate without having video evidence sent straight to the subordinate's attorney. And for that matter, consider a world where accusations, true or false, will no longer depend on one person's word versus another's.

Most anti-social behavior takes place in private between two people (perpetrator and victim); by effectively taking away that privacy, you are exposing that perpetrator's behavior to the world. There's the old saying of "an armed society is a polite society", and when everyone is effectively "armed" with video surveillance tech that sends data straight to the cloud, the bullies and low-lifes of the world will indeed be forced to be more polite, whether they like it or not.

The world of wearable computing will indeed be very different, and there will good and bad aspects to it, just as there is with any transformative technology. But that world will be inevitable in any case, because the technology will be too cheap and useful not to be exploited in every conceivable manner.

For me, the killer app for Google Glass is obvious. I want to be able to activate high resolution video recording in an instant, either with a single spoken word or a gesture/shrug.

I have had many instances while driving/walking/jogging when I've seen some imminent accident/collision/crime where I needed a picture right now and not three seconds later. Fumbling for your cell phone camera takes too long; the moment has passed.

Give me that capability and I'll be an early adopter.

You entire post sounds like what Aaron did (the JSTOR database publication, not the suicide) was wrong and no one should ever follow him. When we think some law is unjust, we should not challenge it, because the rattlesnake goverment could bite us, we should just stay quiet and swallow it up. Is it what you are trying to say?

No, that is not what I'm trying to say, or what I said in my post.

I strongly support efforts to roll back increasingly onerous changes in copyright law. (FYI, I want U.S. copyright to go back to the original 28 year limits, and I want to see software patents eliminated.) I can also admire people who commit acts of civil disobedience, even if I don't necessarily agree with their points of view.

The problem is that what Swartz did was not an act of civil disobedience. It was a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt. The entire point of civil disobedience is to admit to what you did and be punished by the authorities in order to publicize what you believe is an unjust law. Had Swartz accepted that initial plea bargain for the single felony conviction, and then read his manifesto to the court during his sentencing, then people would have at least admired his courage and idealism, even if they didn't agree with what he advocated.

Instead, Swartz blamed other people for the mess he got himself into, including his own girlfriend, whom he should have known better than to involve in the first place. The JSTOR publication was a poorly planned ego trip that blew up in Swartz's face, and that is what I disapprove of. It accomplished nothing except to ruin peoples' lives, particularly that of Aaron Swartz.

Convinced she knew nothing that could be used against Swartz, Norton at first cooperated with the prosecutors.

When I read the line above I already knew the story

After reading her story, all I can say is that she and Swartz made the same mistake: being stupid enough to believe that they were smart enough to outwit a determined adversary with almost unlimited resources.

Prisons are full of people with that attitude. It doesn't matter if you're smarter than the guy across the table from you. You won't be smarter than a roomful of people just like him who are working together to take you down.

I am not saying that the prosecutors are not responsible for what happened to Mr. Swartz, they do.

Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.

Aaron Swartz deliberately set out to commit an act of civil disobedience without thinking through the consequences. According to Norton, Swartz desired a career in politics (another indication of his naivete; I could hardly think of anyone less suited for it), and was deathly afraid of what a felony conviction would do to his prospects. Yet instead of keeping his nose squeaky clean (particularly given his interactions with the Feds after the PACER incident), he pulled a stunt that put him squarely in their sights once again. Did he even think to talk to a lawyer before he started downloading the JSTOR database? Apparently not. His ego and his hubris were his downfall.

But Ms. Norton herself ought to be brave enough to admit that because of her own fucked up cocky attitude that led her to think that she could outsmart the prosecutors (and that she talked)

Unfortunately, Swartz pulled her into his mess the moment he called her up for bail money. The fact that he failed to even anticipate the possibility of arrest, and make provisions beforehand, shows just how dumb a smart person can be.

I also had to laugh when I read Norton's account of how she "outwitted" and "infuriated" the prosecutors during her grand jury testimony. She should spend more time around lawyers, and watch how their courtroom "rage" gets turned on and off like a switch. They won the game just by making her life miserable, and making sure Swartz knew about it. Getting an indictment from the grand jury would have just been icing on the cake for them.

But frankly I think she should stop kicking herself for telling the Feds about the manifesto. It was a public document, for God's sake. Swartz was a jerk for blaming her for talking about something he was supposedly proud to put his name to. Everyone is looking for someone to blame, but she did the best she thought she could with a situation she had no control over.

This is a sad, sad case of two smart people who simply weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were. If nothing else, Swartz's death may at least cause some other starry-eyed idealist to think twice before he or she kicks the hornets' nest.

Why would anyone consider this a good thing?

It means these coins are being hoarded. If it was real money this would be damaging the economy.

It is worth pointing out that the current upward trend in BTC prices began right after the difficulty of mining doubled last December. Mining has ceased to be profitable except for the most sophisticated custom hardware, so the supply of new BTC has dried up for the average person using a graphics card.

No new supply = rising prices. The deflationary spiral has definitely begun. The speculators and hoarders are just waiting to cash in, and it won't be pretty when it happens.